Under Construction: Hamptonhenge

2 more raised beds built with fieldstone

Because I'm a true glutton for punishment, I'm building a new pair of raised beds out of fieldstone. My brother-in-law has dubbed this great pile o' rubble HamptonHenge. He's quite the comedian.

The beds are 10 feet by 6 feet, and all of the stone comes from our property. It's not called the Granite State for nothing. Here are some pictures of the progress...

Building a fieldstone wall is like assembling a puzzle with infinite pieces...
that are buried all over the place.

“The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.”

- Bertrand Russell

Rocks with flat surfaces! Easier to stack! Woohoo!

My dog inspects the 3 old beds I built last year.

The Cucumber Forest

The cuke seedlings are pretty happy...



The 2 varieties I'm growing:
Alibi Cucumbers from Johnnny's Seeds (pickling cukes)
Marketmore 97 Cukes from Hart's Seeds (burpless salad cucumbers)

Onions from Seed are Doomed!

For the record, I'm still committed to a strong onion harvest from seed. In fact, here's the latest look at how some of my 'tub onions' are growing:


In a disturbing turn of events, however, I've come across a dissenting voice from a favorite blogger Farmgirl. She writes:

"Anyone can produce a delicious crop as long as they follow my cardinal rule: Never ever start them from seed.....It only took me several growing seasons and at least two dozen packets of seeds to finally face the truth: This is never going to happen. Onions simply take too long to mature."

Farmgirl goes on to describe that she ends up with a basket of cocktail onions each time she starts them from seed. Oh dear, that sounds eerily similar to my 2006 onion crop.

This does NOT bode well for The Great Onion Challenge.

Prevent Leggy Seedlings!

I planted (what I hope to be) stunning Juliet tomato plants from Johnny's Seeds. (I'm hoping they end up looking like the picture on the left).

I planted on March 13th, and the seedlings sprouted and have progressing nicely... until....they have begun to look leggy over the last week.

After doing some research, this is what I've learned (forgive my newbiness):

1. Heat mats after germination are a Bad Thing. When using heat mats (as I do), remove them as soon as the seedlings start to break the soil. If you don't remove the mats, the heat will force the plants to stretch up.
   
2. The light source needs to be 2" to 4" above the top of the seedlings. Seedlings stretch towards the light if they are too far away, becoming leggy. In my case, I built my light stand with fixed fluorescent lights. They are 10" to 12" above the seedlings. Time to revisit that design.
   

Some useful reference articles:

• Fine Gardening Thread on Seed Starting
• Fine Gardening Thread on Leggy Seedlings

The Great Onion Challenge - Part 1

I'm having a conversation with my father the other day, and we were discussing how last year's onions were not as successful as I'd like. My dad has always kept a large garden since I was an infant, and he has always had successful yields despite the lack of sunshine in his garden in Massachusetts. He knows what he's talking about. So, I had wondered aloud why my onions had underperformed. In that inimitable way he has of explaining everything, he gave me the answer. "Well", he exclaimed, "Nobody grows onions from seed anyway. Everyone uses sets." The gears in my mind began to turn. Aha! The gauntlet was thrown. In my competitive little world, I now have a challenge for 2007....the challenge of growing a bumper crop of onions from seed.

Last year (my first garden year), I was disappointed with my onion crop. The onions came in late, and were smaller than I was hoping for. Why? I can only guess, but here in New Hampshire, we had record-setting floods last spring, which kept the plants out of the ground until summer. Additionally, I had not started the onion seeds until mid-April. The seedlings were small and immature.

This year, I hope to have a stronger onion crop by following a more structured plan. Here's the plan:

1. Two different varieties. I'll plant a white onion and red onion this year. My hope is that, at the very least, one variety thrives.
   
2. Staggered planting times. I'll stagger the times I've set the seeds to germinate. The goal is to make the season longer and to harvest more onions throughout the fall.
   
3. More plants! In my humble mind, more plants will provide more opportunities for success.

The two varieties I've planted are:
Snow White Hybrid Onion
Red Delicious Hybrid Onion

Let the games begin!

Some useful articles:

• Burpee's Growing Onions from Seed

Blizzard of April

Snow?! On April 4th! Looks like I won't be ammending the garden soil today. My garden is covered with 8 inches of snow. Did I hear correctly... it's supposed to be Spring in Southern New Hampshire?

Windmills in the Sky

Flying Wind Farms!

The Economist has a fascinating article on a novel way to produce electricity via wind: a flying wind farm. Consider that as you travel higher in the atmosphere, the winds become much stronger, able to produce significantly more energy. Using an airborne rig to capture this energy would provide much more predictable and significant amounts of power. Additionally, terrestrial wind farms are limited by the space you can place them on land. Launching generators into the air, however, offers so much more area for a power generator like this to work.

Is this technology science fiction? I'd have to say this technology has a ways to go before it can be useful, and may be a longshot to work even then. There are some interesting companies out there that are working to realize these ideas commercially. Some of these include:

Sky Windpower (the company mentioned in the article)
Magenn Power, Inc. - interesting helium-filled air rotor system

I'm certainly intrigued by the thought of generators like this. Perhaps they will be commercially realized someday. I'd love to have one of these hovering over my place generating our town's electricity! I'd hate to be under one of these rigs when something went wrong and they crashed to earth, though.

An Easier Way to Start Seedlings

Using Jiffy 7 Peat Pots to grow seedlings

I was stocking up on some seed-starting supplies at the local Agway and stumbled upon these little pucks of peat called Jiffy 7s. They are compressed blocks of peat wrapped in a mesh covering. At about 20 cents per peat pot, they certainly are inexpensive enough, so I decided to try them out.

My experience with them has been excellent. Bottom-water these solid little pucks and...poof!...they expand into pliable little planting cups ready for a seed. The best part is that, once the seedling is ready, you can plant them directly into the soil - never needing to remove the seedling from a seed tray. So far, I've used them for bell peppers (the seedling shown in the picture on the left) and some cukes. Very convenient!



Reference:
Amazon has several different sources for the Jiffy 7 Peat Pots.
There also is an online tutorial about these at the Ferry Morse website.

Which Organic Fertilizers Should you Use?

In addition to compost, there are a number of manufactured organic fertilizers that are great for the home garden. These are bonemeal, bloodmeal, fish emulsion, cottonseed meal and wood ashes. The Wilmington Star (NC) has an excellent article that describes the differences of each.

Organic fertilizers have advantages over chemical fertilizers, as well as a few disadvantages. On the plus side, organic fertilizer avoids:

• the possibility of "burning" plants with the concentrated chemicals (i.e. an over supply of some nutrients)
• the progressive decrease of real or perceived "soil health", apparent in loss of structure, reduced ability to absorb precipitation, lightening of soil color, etc.
• the necessity of reapplying artificial fertilizers regularly (and perhaps in increasing quantities) to maintain fertility
• the cost (substantial and rising in recent years) and resulting lack of independence

Some additional helpful links:

• Fertilizer entry at Wikipedia